Colorado

The Highest State, Second Edition

By Thomas J. Noel and Duane A. Smith

Publication Year: 2011

Chronicling the people, places, and events of the state’s colorful history, Colorado: The Highest State is the story of how Colorado grew up. Through booms and busts in farming and ranching, mining and railroading, and water and oil, Colorado’s past is a cycle of ups and downs as high as the state’s peaks and as low as its canyons. The second edition is the result of a major revision, with updates on all material, two new chapters, and ninety new photos. Containing more than a humdrum history, each chapter is followed by questions, suggested activities, recommended reading, a “Did you know?” trivia section, and recommended websites, movies, and other multimedia that highlight the important concepts covered and lead the reader to more information. Additionally, the book is filled with photographs, making Colorado: The Highest State a fantastic text for middle and high school Colorado history courses.

Contents

Preface

Colorado’s history, like the state itself, has had many ups and downs. Booms
and busts in farming and ranching, in mining and railroading, in water and oil
have carried Colorado as high as the state’s peaks and as low as its canyons.
Our state’s fascinating history is made up of interesting characters.
Fathers Domínguez and Escalante—two Spanish priests—first explored,...

Acknowledgments

Teachers and students from all over Colorado helped us with this book.
Among others, we especially thank Chuck Woodward and Art Cordova of
Gateway High School in Aurora, David Smith of Samuels School in Denver,
Nancy Gregory and Ray Jenkins of Aurora’s Hinkley High School, Jerry
Fabyanic and Pat Heist Ward of Aurora Hills Middle School, Dan Barber...

Timeline [Includes County Map]

1. The Highest State

The young college professor hoped to see the Colorado prairies and mountains
from the top of Pikes Peak. For a young woman in 1893, that trip would
have been quite an adventure. So Katharine Lee Bates and some friends hired
a wagon and a driver and started up America’s most famous mountain.
The trip thrilled Professor Bates. Atop Pikes Peak she wrote: “I was looking...

2. The First Coloradans

Evidence of the first human beings in Colorado dates back more than 17,000
years. These first people were hunters and food gatherers who had come to
North America from Asia around 25,000 years ago. To find out more about
these earliest Coloradans, archaeologists continue to excavate their sites and
study the relics they find. The ancient past remains a giant puzzle for which...

3. Native Peoples of Colorado

While the Ancestral Puebloans were building and farming in southwestern
Colorado, other Native Americans were exploring the eastern plains.
Archaeologists have found rock shelters, camps, storage pits, artifacts, and
burial sites in that region. Like the Ancestral Puebloans, these other early
Indians were hunters and gatherers at first, and some later became farmers.
They were related to Native American cultures in the East, perhaps even to...

4. Explorers, Trappers, and Traders

As early as the 1600s, the Native Americans realized they were not going
to have Colorado to themselves. From the south came men riding strange
beasts, practicing a different religion, and bringing tools and weapons the
Indians had never seen. The lives of these foreigners as well as those of the
Indians would never be the same. In 1598 the Spanish explorer Juan de Oñate
commanded the expedition that brought European settlement to what...

5. Up the Rio Grande

Before the gold rush and the arrival of English-speaking people, the Spanish
had already settled in Colorado. These pioneers came up from New Mexico
along the Rio Grande, the third-longest river in the United States. The Rio
Grande became the pioneer route from Old Mexico and New Mexico into
what is now southern Colorado...

6. Natives Versus Newcomers

In the 1880s, natives who had long occupied Colorado began to face newcomers
who also wished to live here. Both groups called this land home.
Sadly, neither group ever completely understood the other. Neither the
Native Americans nor the Euro-Americans, as US residents of European
ancestry are sometimes called, were all bad or all good. They were just human
beings trying to do their best for...

7. Miners

“PIKES PEAK GOLD—A NEW CALIFORNIA.” This headline greeted readers of
The Leavenworth [Kansas] Times on September 11, 1858. In Kansas and elsewhere,
the news of a new gold discovery raced like the wind across the land.
Dreams of gold excited many people beyond reason and drove them to
go get it, to leave everything behind and head for the mountains. Gold, people...

8. City Life

The mining frontier was an urban frontier. Camps and towns were built
at the same time the miners came. This was different from the cattle and
farming frontiers, where towns were usually formed years after the first settlers
arrived. The miners did not have time to raise crops, manufacture their
equipment, or haul in their supplies. But they did have gold and silver to pay
others to do those things for them. Therefore, people...

9. Southern Coloradans

Denver may have dominated Colorado news, but other parts of the state
were also making history. As railroads opened up the southern part of the
state, its agricultural base expanded with the development of tourism, coal,
and oil. William Jackson Palmer organized and served as president of the Denver
& Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG). As the name reveals, this line ran from
Denver to the Rio Grande in Alamosa. Palmer believed Colorado’s southern...

10. Cowboys and Farmers

I’m up in the morning before daylight,
Before I sleep the moon shines bright.
This is how a favorite cowboy song, “The Old Chisholm Trail,” describes the
workday of one of the West’s most popular characters. The cowboy has ridden
the range in Colorado since the 1850s, although today he is found more
often in a pickup truck than on a horse.
The cowboy and his horse, the ranches, the long cattle drives, and the
cattle towns have all become part of American history and folklore. Hardly...

11. Western Slopers

The Western Slope lies on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide in
Colorado. Its high mountains, river valleys, mesas (high, flat tablelands), and
lonely stretches of semi-deserts are some of the state’s most rugged and
beautiful land. This part of Colorado gives birth to the great Colorado River,
which carries two-thirds of the state’s water. Water has always been important
to growth and development and will continue to be in the future. Water...

12. Hard Times

If you could go back to the year 1900, what would you find? Many Coloradans
your age would not be in school but instead would be working on farms and
in factories. You would also find many men and boys working in damp, dark
mines or in hot, noisy smelters where gold and silver were taken out of ores.
Miners and smelter workers often worked ten hours a day for three dollars
a day or less. Because of the dangerous working conditions, these laborers
were lucky to work an entire year...

13. Reformers

Benjamin Barr Lindsey was a tiny man. He weighed ninety-eight pounds and
stood barely five feet, five inches tall, but he stands tall among Colorado’s
reformers. Lindsey spent his life working for the poor and the powerless and
especially for their children.
Perhaps Lindsey loved underdogs because he grew up as one. In 1880, when
he was ten, his family came to Denver from a farm in Tennessee. They moved
into a shack on West Colfax Avenue. After Ben’s father...

14. The Automobile Age

For many Americans, life seemed to speed up after the arrival of the automobile.
During the 1920s, these horseless carriages changed the places and
the ways people lived, worked, and played. Autos enabled people to move to
new suburban homes and still work, go to school, and play in the city.
Cars cost a lot of money, but during the 1920s many people had money.
World War I (1914–1918) had strengthened Colorado’s economy. When...

15. The Depression, Recovery, and Growth

For every boom, there is usually a bust. Colorado’s silver boom ended
with the panic of 1893. The good times of the 1920s ended with the Great
Depression that began in 1929. Following the 1929 New York Stock Market
crash, stock values fell and many companies went out of business.
Recovery
came very slowly and only after the federal government spent billions of dollars
to put people back to work.
Uncle Sam, as Americans called the US...

16. Economic and Ethnic Diversity

At age seventeen, Charles Boettcher left Germany for America. He was
not alone. Germans were the single largest foreign-born group to settle in
Colorado between 1870 and 1910. Charles hopped off the Union Pacific train
at Cheyenne, Wyoming, for a visit with his brother Herman, who ran a hardware
store there. Herman put his little brother to work in the store, paying
him two dollars a week and letting him sleep under the counter at night....

17. Conserving Colorado

As the United States celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976, Colorado was
observing its 100th anniversary as a state. Some Coloradans thought 1976
was a good time to look back at the first 100 years and think about their
history.
The biggest change was the number of people living in the state. In
1876, there were about 100,000 Coloradans. By 1976, there were over 2 million.
In 1876, many Indians still lived in Colorado. In 1976, about 9,000 were...

18. Boom and Bust

Colorado’s ups and downs have been as high as the state’s 14,000-foot mountains
and as low as its river canyons. Colorado history is a tale of booms
and busts. For centuries, Spanish- and English-speaking peoples avoided the
state, with its high mountains and semi-desert lowlands. It took a gold rush
to lure European Americans to Colorado. The first big boom came with the
1858–1859 gold strike, which started a large-scale hunt for natural resources....

19. Natural Resources

Protecting our state’s natural resources from pollution, destruction, and
overuse is one of the biggest challenges Coloradans face. How much of our
land should be used for agriculture? How much for houses? How much for
shopping malls? How many mountains should be left untouched and how
many turned into ski areas? How many forests should be used for timber
or be protected as wilderness? How much water can be diverted from rivers
before it causes...

20. Today Is Going to Be Long, Long Ago

Colorado has been one of the fastest-growing states in the nation. All this
growth has caused some problems. Highways are crowded with cars, especially
during rush hour when many commuters are going to or coming
home from work. Traffic also stacks up on Sundays, when people return
from weekends in the mountains. Traffic sometimes slows cars down or
even stops them. How often have you been stuck in a traffic jam?
With this growing population, Colorado’s map has...

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